Elites take over the city (18th – 21st C): what can research do about it?

Brussels, 28-30 April 2011

Palais des Académies
Académie royale des Sciences, des Lettres et des Beaux-Arts de Belgique
Rue Ducale 1, 1000 Bruxelles

This symposium aims to confront empirical research, its work methods and ethical commitments, when it takes on the study of elites in the city. The speakers will analyse the methods influential groups use or have used to shape the city. These methods include coalitions, technical/legal inventions, academic know-how and professional expertise, lobbying, residential strongholds, and many more. The symposium is thus intended to stimulate debate on the production of urban space and its enmeshed power relations, today and in the past, as well as to explore the fieldwork done in order to tackle theses issues.

more information here

About: Robert Grimm

All over Europe, cities are faced with the challenge of using cultural resources to re-position their city in an increasingly culturally and economically diversified European space. Related to this is a clear recognition of the growing importance of cultural resources for economic and community development. This produces new opportunities and challenges for local cultural planning and management. In order to fully exploit the innovative and supportive role of culture in European urban development, it will be necessary to develop a new socially and culturally sensitive professionalism, able to cross the boundaries between the arts, design, urban and spatial planning, public policy and the market, artistic creativity and cultural management. The MA in European Urban Cultures offers a specialist programme aimed at graduate students from Europe and elsewhere with undergraduate degrees in subject areas such as the social sciences; cultural and leisure studies; art, design and architecture; urban theory and planning; cultural marketing and management. The course is also targeted at professionals and administrators eager for the latest experiences, ideas and insights in urban cultural policy.